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Hello again folks!

It's Thursday, and... well, you know the drill by now. The subject for today is the message system. Basically, we have been trying to find ways of making messages less intrusive. In a single player environment, a steady stream of pop-ups is not that bad, but when you run a multiplayer game where you cannot pause all the time, pop-ups are incredibly annoying. So we added the little Message Window and nuked all pop-up messages. Those of you who have played Sengoku will be familiar with that system. However, there are problems with that approach. Pop-ups still have their place when a message is really important. Thus, for Crusader Kings II, we took a few steps back.

What we have now is a system very similar to the one in Victoria II and EU3: Divine Wind, but instead of the little flag notifiers we have the new Message Window. Message pop-ups can be customized to look like either letters or normal event windows, and can be toggled on or off for every message type. They also support custom (and fully moddable) pictures and sounds. Oh, and you will probably be pleased to know that the message log is back again. :)

Crusader_Kings2_DevDiary_20111027_02.png

There are a few special pop-up messages, such as battle results and the message you get when a child is born (where you get the option of naming the baby yourself.)

Crusader_Kings2_DevDiary_20111027_01.png

That's all for now. Next week: Crusader Pandas.
 
Thanks for the new diary! I have one minor suggestion on the naming window. It's great that you have a suggested name and the ability to write in your own. But what if I don't care for Astrid, but I want another Swedish sounding name for my princess? Being that I'm not too familiar with Swedish names, this might be challenging without additional choices. If I'm Polish or Bulgarian or Georgian, I have even less of a clue of what an apt name would be.

You could always take a moment and look around your family-characters and name her after someone there. :)
 
snip of awesomeness

When is CK2 coming out?

On another matter, it seems to me that these dev diaries keep getting shorter and shorter. It used to be that we'd get quite a lot of text, and even if most of it was filler it made the whole thing seem more familiar somehow. Anyone agree with me?
 
Oh thank God, I was already afraid you guys were going to do it the WoW way and leave the Pandas to be handled by one of the expansions! This way we get to play as the much-wanted Pandas from the very 1.0 version.
 
I have to say I'm glad and reassured that the two type of messages will be in. That way, I could use the "sengoku message box" to watch closely those I think are important and still have the impression that other things are going on. In fact, the problem with this message box is that you never know what is truly important. So you cannot see all the events related to something, and you may have to go back some days later. I remember when I do an AAR (I just have few, but still), I sometimes take a screenshot of the big message box only to remember that some event happened some days before.

Also, I support a randomize option for children's names.
 
so, there's only gonna be one proposed name? Would of liked a few more, but the mere fact that I can name them whatever I want, makes it up :D

(though, what will the AI do? I've always felt weird seeing capetian King Roger I of France :s)

The message system looks great!:)

Regarding the naming option, I would also have loved the option to have the complete cultural name list to choose from.

Furthermore a Capetian king Roger could happen; if he's a younger son (not a likely name for the first born though), his mother was a De Hauteville and he somehow became heir.;)
 
Yay message log! YAY MESSAGE LOG!

YAY MESSAGE LOG!!!

But yeah, yay message log. :p